Just ask the source

Sometimes life is good. I came across a site with nice information about simulating of lightning. The results look quite impressive and my first thought was that this would be very nice for a GIMP# plug-in. Too bad they had no source code available. So I decided to contact the author and he nicely responded that he was going to talk to some people at the university where this program was created. A day later he mailed me back that they are going to release the source!

The lesson I learned: if you ask people politely they are very often willing to help you.